Case Report (Part 1)

a medical case report, often known as a case study, is a comprehensive account of a patient encounter. The most crucial part of a case report, and the reason you’d bother to write one, is that the situation is sufficiently unique, rare, or intriguing that other medical professionals can learn from it. 

Criteria

Firstly, a medical case report should be unique and provide sufficient information about a particular patient’s case. It is not necessary to explain a particularly unique or uncommon situation because there is value in gathering information on a large number of standard cases.

Clinical Practice Articles are articles that describe the treatment of multiple patients in a similar way (a ‘case series’).

Language

The written language of the article should be excellent. Please note that the journal editors may reject your manuscript during the initial screening process if it is incomprehensible and hence unsuitable for peer review. Accordingly, it may be advantageous to have the manuscript read by a native English speaker with scientific knowledge for authors whose first language is not English. So, there are numerous commercial companies, including Rovedar Pub, that may provide this service to authors.

The most important aspects of preparing a case report

A case report has several key components that we will go over in-depth in this post and the next post.

These are the sections:

  1-Authors

   2-Title

   3- Abstract

   4-Keywords

   5-Main Body

   6-Data (and Software) Availability

   7-Reporting Guidelines (if applicable)

   8-Consent

   9-Author Contributions

   10-Competing Interests

   11-Grant Information

   12-Acknowledgments (optional)

   13-Supplementary Material

   14-References and footnotes

   15-Figures and Tables (if applicable)

   16-Images (if applicable)

   17-Mathematical Scripts (if applicable)

   18-Special Characters (if applicable)

1. Authors

 All authors should have made a meaningful contribution to the work and agree to take responsibility for the work they did. All authors should sign off on the final version before its publication. So, being an author implies that you are fully responsible for the content of the article and that your work follows our editorial guidelines. Authors are individuals who take direct responsibility of the work in large and multi-center partnerships. Therefore, author’s contributions section should include the contribution of each author in detail. However, Acknowledgements section include anyone who has helped but does not match the authorship criteria. So, the authors should also enclose any support from a professional medical writer.

2. Title 

Please give the article a concise and specific title that accurately describes the content.

3. Abstract

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and contain a concise description of the article. The importance of the work should not be overstated in the abstract, even though it should explain why the piece might be intriguing. So, the abstract should not contain any citations. If necessary, abbreviations should be spelled clearly. Abstracts for original research should include Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions (if relevant).

4. Keywords and phrases

Authors should provide up to eight relevant keywords that characterize their article’s subject. Your article’s visibility will improve as a result of these changes.

5. The main skeleton

The major body of the article’s format is flexible: it should be succinct, making it easy to read and review, and given in a Case Report-style manner. The main body include a brief overview of past cases in the relevant area, as well as a synopsis of the case’s history and course, or of the drug’s common use and recorded adverse events. Patient information should contain demographic facts such as age, gender, ethnicity, and occupation (without providing any information that could lead to patient identity), the major symptoms, medical and family history, and relevant previous interventions and their outcomes. therefore, the report should include details of the clinical findings, a clear timeline, diagnostic evaluation, any therapeutic measures, and information on follow-up and outcomes. A description of the findings’ significance and relevance, as well as how they may affect our future understanding of disease processes, diagnosis, and treatment, should be included.

Ethics policies: All research must be carried out within a sound ethical framework.

6. Access to data (and software)

 The Data Availability statement should specify how, where, and under what conditions the data underpinning the results can be accessible. All data underlying the conclusions are provided as part of the publication and no extra source data are necessary,” the statement should read if all associated data are presented in the article itself. If you’re writing an article about new software, please make the source code accessible on a Version Control System and include information about the repository and the license that the product is released under.

Data Availability statement, you should see the related section instruction in the journal. Additional information here is no restrictions on the number of figures or tables included in articles. Additional materials, such as questionnaires, supporting photos, or tables, that support the paper’s major claims but aren’t necessary to follow the study design and analysis of the results, can be provided as extended data; descriptions of the materials and methods should be in the main article. 

If you have any more data, please deposit it in an approved repository and specify the title, repository name, DOI or accession number, and license in the publication under the heading “Extended data”. In the main body of the paper, please give citations to further data. So, you can see Add a Data Availability Statement to Your Manuscript for more information. Of note, underlying datasets should not contain information that can be used to directly identify participants unless they have given specific permission to publish their information.

7. Reporting Requirements

Standards of reporting: Authors can use these rules to guarantee that they’ve presented a thorough account of their study, making it easy for others to evaluate and replicate it. Articles must follow scientific reporting requirements that are based on consensus.

8. Consent

The authors must obtain written informed consent from the patient in question (or their legal guardian for a minor, or next of kin). Please include a section in your article named “Consent”. This section that states that “Written informed consent for publication of their clinical details and/or clinical photos were acquired from the patient/parent/guardian/relative”.  Any clinical images must come with the patient(s)’ written agreement for publication. Clinical photographs must be free of any distinguishing features, medical record numbers, or codes that show the identity of the patient.